Catholic Exchange, Stephen Beale: If the truth of the Eucharist has ever seemed strange to you, that’s because it should.

St. Paul said, “We preach Christ crucified, to the Jews indeed a stumbling block, and to the Gentiles foolishness.” The Eucharist is the enduring testament to the reality of the crucifixion of God Incarnate. So it is fitting that the Eucharist is its own stumbling block for some. That bread and wine could be turned into the body and blood and soul and divinity of Christ is certainly foolishness to our hyper-empiricist world.

At the same time, as believers our faith in this mystery is one that also seeks to understand it. To be sure, St. Thomas Aquinas carves out a small intellectual foothold in his doctrine of transubstantiation, which helps us to grasp the raw mechanics of how the Eucharist is transformed. Read in full here.